2: Community group about awareness and acceptance of your and other heritages. Project Heritage. Spreading this through Instagram mainly, with a target audience of younger people. Personal stories along with a photo. Online personalities like YouTubers and refugee support groups. Suggestion: this sounds great! Just consider how you’ll manage cross-promotion (sharing content across accounts, and getting the celebrities you’re working with to share your campaign), and perhaps have someone in mind to moderate comments.

3: Education for children in offshore asylum centres – “Refugee children are still children and they have a right to education”. Facebook and Twitter, mainly aiming at the younger generation. Spreading awareness through schools, connecting with online communities. Suggestion: The idea of connecting with specific schools is a good one – you might think about how you can get local communities to send support (including books and other learning resources) to children in detention.

4: “Back to Basics” – pro-organic food movement. Audience – young parents, pregnant women, people who go to farmer’s markets. Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. Snapchat for a daily reminder, Instagram for food bloggers and health and fitness accounts. Suggestion: consider how you might differentiate your campaign from other similar campaigns.

5: Political campaign to increase the demand for organic food – an unhealthy food tax, with the money from that being used for healthy food. Advertising it through Facebook and Instagram to reach young audiences. Suggestion: telling young people that the food they like will be taxed more might be a hard sell – consider how you’ll make this message more positive.

6: Encouraging people to download the app to ‘hit the A button’. Ads on Spotify. Suggestion: develop your idea in more detail, consider using independent music platforms like Bandcamp.

7: Budget pizza business: “budget pizza any time any place (in Perth)”. Yelp, Google Plus (for reviews), Twitter to advertise discounts. Suggestion: consider developing the personality of your brand online to help it stand out from the competition.

Today I ran a couple of short workshops for students visiting Curtin. They developed a digital strategy for their campaign, business, or organisation, and presented their plan in lightning talks. Here’s some brief feedback:

1 The cool kids club: addressing parents and children. Ads, website forums, FB page. Asking people to post positive reviews. Suggestion: you need to think carefully about issues around privacy – how will you create a safe space for people to talk without being identified?

2: “You can help”: messages to friends of teenagers with mental illnesses. Mainly using FB. Suggestion: again, consider how you’ll manage privacy and moderation – how will you help make this a safe space?

3: Racial representation in performing arts. Looking at colour casting, stigma around casting PoC in movies, musicals, etc. Worked together as a community that puts on plays with colour-blind casting. Tumblr, crowdfunding, Twitter for announcements, use tags to gather community around the organisation. Suggestion: this is an excellent idea, and you’ve thought carefully for strategies linking local productions with a broader community. Just be aware that you may need to engage in careful moderation of some of the platforms you’re using (which could be a place to ask allies to provide support).

4: New religion: ‘despair’. Mission is to sacrifice children to a volcano. Snapchat and Tumblr to spread our message due to their passionate approach. Audience: the elderly and those over 16, as they’re safe from sacrifice. One issue to consider: a potential mismatch between your chosen platforms and your key audience. Maybe consider a TV slot to inform the elderly about the exciting potential of your religion!

5: Gun control in the US: key communities – general public and young adults, Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter. A suggestion: consider how you’ll differentiate yourself from other similar campaigns – how will you build on and expand their work?

6: Recognition in the Australian Constitution: broad range of audiences. Instagram and Facebook, TV shows and Facebook for the older generation. Suggestion: think careful about how to centre Indigenous analysis and voices.

7: Political organisation, The Blues, for conserving water: through Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter because of their passion. Suggestion: think about how you’ll connect with local communities and councils.

This workshop explores different ways to build activist events that are open and inclusive. There is a tendency in activism to end up talking only to people we agree with, and to build communities where people who don’t think of themselves as activists are uncomfortable taking part. However, if we want to create meaningful change we need to think about how to be open to people who are different from us, and have different ideas. This workshop will explore a few basic principles, including:

Tiered activism (allowing people to take small steps),

The importance of other stories,

Empathic communication, and

Challenging activist identities.

As we talk about each principle, we will encourage people to share their own experiences about what has worked well and what has not, and imagine ways to build more effective activism

Bio: Sky is a researcher and activist from Australia who is currently based in Toronto. Her research focuses on how activists around the world are trying to build alternatives to the current system, and she is interested in sharing tactics and strategies to help different communities learn from each other. She recently co-edited Lessons for Social Change in the Global Economy: Voices from the Field.

Many thanks to Maria Sidiropoulou for her work organising this and translating the content (she will also be providing translation during the workshop). You can find her writing on Global Voices.

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